


alabaster pools of jazz

by MacBeth



Series: Multi-fandom meme [2]
Category: Blake's 7
Genre: Gen, Poetry prompt, dangerous elisions, multi-fandom meme, music alone shall live
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-01
Updated: 2014-01-01
Packaged: 2018-01-07 00:14:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 524
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1113195
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MacBeth/pseuds/MacBeth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's dangerous.  It's illegal.</p><p>It's just music.</p>
            </blockquote>





	alabaster pools of jazz

Once, when he was still a young man and only a casual troublemaker, Avon had actually heard jazz music played.

You had to know the right people, who knew the right people, and the right people had to vouch for you. Only after all that did you get the chance to be led through the right sequence of side corridors, down into the sections of the city dome where even the Delta grades felt uneasy, until you reached whatever little corner the renegades had found to play in. There was always someone brewing and selling hideous raw spirits for drinking, the stuff that nearly blinded you. There were always women, and men too, with sly eyes and pursed mouths, looking for a connection that could give them a fresh dose of whatever chemical anesthetic was popular that year, anything to dull the occasional flicker of concern that life really shouldn’t be like this.

It had to be like that – the slimy, gritty underbelly of civilisation, the sort of behaviour that wasn’t supposed to happen any more, not in an ordered society. How the hell did anyone even learn to play it, with no recordings, no teachers, no legal means of passing on the knowledge? Even the instruments on which the music was played were illegal.

And no wonder – just a few minutes listening to the sound made Avon’s skin crawl. The music was sexual, it was seditious, it defied order, it made its own rules and then turned around and casually broke them. It headed off in one direction, as if it had a plan and knew what to do next, and then whirled around in its tracks, dodged sideways, improvised, changed its nature. The music told people that life of a completely different sort was possible – not only possible, but preferable.

Outside, the service corridor had gleamed with white tile, bright and smooth as alabaster, hard surfaces naked and empty under glaring lights. Inside, it was sultry and dark. A woman in tight, ragged clothing had pressed against Avon as he stood by the wall, but he had ignored her, too caught up in trying to understand the music well enough to know what it would do next.

The woman had given up and moved on to another, more promising mark. Avon hadn’t given up trying to grasp the music, but when he tried to arrange for another visit to the jazz underworld, his contact dried up on him and he never found another route that would take him back. An occasional rumour would reach him, but it never came to anything.

After a few months, he stopped looking. The masters of improvisation had disappeared back into the hidden streams that flowed underneath the ordered and smooth surface of the city. It was better, anyway, not to break away so completely from established norms. There was no true harmony in life, and the threat of chaos had lurked behind each discord.

After he met Anna Grant, he didn’t think about jazz any more. He should have; he knew he should have remembered it. It might have helped warn him. Or console him afterwards.

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a multi-fandom meme, to a random poetry prompt:  
>  _From the alabaster pools of jazz_ (Bob Kaufman)


End file.
